I want to try doing some marquetry work. My drawing skills aren’t too good so I thought I might be able to use Sketchup to help design my projects. I have two basic questions:

1. What is the best way to create line drawings from photos imported from Sketchup?I have already tried this as you can see from the before and after pics below. I used the Line and Freehand tools to create the Sketchup rendering.

2. Is there a way to add to my wood selection in the Sketchup program? There weren’t many woods to choose from in my free version. That’s why I used colors on the two experimental pics below.I want to build up a library with the woods I have and can get, so I can use them instead of colors.

Any help with the above questions would be welcome and fully appreciated. Thanks for reading.

-- Mike, an American living in Norway.

9 replies so far

Welcome to marquetry Mike. You’re going to get addicted like the rest of us…....... but that’s a good thing.
Forget sketchup. Download the free version of inkscape and then go to here for all you need to know about making patterns from photos.

Have fun.

-- Paul M ..............If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats he would have given us fiberglass trees. http://prmdesigns.com/

Thanks Jonathan for the links. I did try to put it out, but I have Sketchup 8 and it doesn’t seem to work in the way described in the ‘how to’ I work on it further if I don’t go with the Inkscape solution.

Thank you Paul for the Inkscape suggestion and the info link. I have to go to bed now, so I will check it all out tomorrow and let you know how it went.

I’d not use Sketchup for that type of work. It’s not designed for artistic, 2d drawing so I doubt it’s as good as other programs. The other problem with Sketchup is that it doesn’t do real curves. Everything is a straight line.

I’d probably be more inclined to use a graphics program like Gimp. The learning curve is steeper but there are lots more tools available for 2D drawing.

I can’t answer your first question, but I can answer the second. Yes there is a way to add to you wood selection in Sketchup. Chiefwoodworker has a series of tutorials on Sketchup, and textures are covered in one of them.

Hope this helps

-- I may have lost my marbles, but I still have my love of woodworking

Mike here is a thought. Some guys take a photo and open it in some software like photoshop. They will change the photo to black and white or cartoon it. Then the play with the lighting levels, chroma etc… when they get it to a point that they can cut it on a saw they print the pattern. Portraits are done this way.

My thanks to everyone for these thoughtful suggestions and links. For the time being I have taken Paul’s (Shipwright) suggestion to download inkscape and used the link he provided in his comments above to watch the first tutorial of a whole series on how to use the inkscape vector program. It looks like just the thing for my purposes.

Dave Your suggestion about Photoshop was excellent, but the few times I tried it, I found it very difficult to learn. The Inkscape program is probably the best for me, plus it has some similarities to Sketchup which helps me learn it quicker.